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Three Approaches to Change How Your Customers Work
How can you influence your customers to do things the “right” way?
The title “change agent” sounds like some mysterious job forged from tragedy and immortalized in the panels of a comic book. If you’re explaining it to a five-year-old, you’d say, “I help people do things more easily.” But, of course, it’s rarely that simple.
To enter someone else’s world and say you know better than they do takes chutzfah. At the end of the day, that’s what your data team is trying to do: change how people work and think.
There are a couple of approaches they can take:
- Keys to the Kingdom
- Marketplace of Ideas
- Enabler
Keys to The Kingdom
This approach can appear the most effective on the surface. As the data team, you hold access to the information your customers need to make decisions. As a subject-matter expert in this area, you know better, so you simply provide them with the data in the methods and medium that are “right.” There is no “Download to CSV” button. The team might say, “If you need that, we haven’t done our job correctly.”
Here’s the typical pattern that follows this approach:
- A major rebuild effort
- Training and knowledge sharing to help users adjust
- High initial use and positive feedback
- Users request new features that don’t align with the team’s ideals
- Usage dropping to a small group of superusers
When the usage drop happens, it’s not that users stop getting the information. It’s that they find another way. They might run into Nancy after a quarterly all-hands meeting and learn that she can generate that CSV they wanted.
This approach can work in the short term, but often sacrifices long-term partnership between your team and the business.
Marketplace of Ideas
In a “marketplace of ideas” approach, your team builds exactly what users ask for, while also developing a separate track of products built the “right” way. From there, you showcase the ideal set of products in meetings and slide decks. Instead of forcing adoption, you use marketing to win your customers over.
They still have the warm and comfortable blanket of a table of numbers, but there’s also other methods which save them time and show them information in ways they couldn’t produce themselves.
This approach works best in risk-averse functions like finance and regulated environments. The risk: your team splits its effort, building two sets of products, halving your throughput. For this to work, it requires patience and the trust that exposure will eventually convert.
“You can’t change how people work by force. You earn that right through trust, patience, and credibility.”
Enabler
The enabler approach focuses on building exactly what the customer asks for. In contrast to the marketplace of ideas, the team doesn’t build the products the “right” way. They build what the customer believes they need and nothing else. But what your team is doing is buying credibility with your customers. By listening intently and providing outstanding customer service, they’re earning a seat at the table to influence how your customers work. Over time your team can use their hard-won credibility to steer customers towards the right solution. It’s a war of attrition. It will require your team to build things in ways that they know are “wrong.” But it earns the customers trust over the long run.
Which Approach is “Right?”
Really, there is no single right approach. That’s something your team will discover over time. Each approach can work, depending on your team’s makeup, maturity, and the needs of your customers.
So, which one works best for you?
Shaun
Shaun Davis, your personal data therapist, understands your unique challenges and helps you navigate through the data maze. With keen insight, he discerns the signal from the noise, tenaciously finding the right solutions to guide you through the ever-growing data landscape. Shaun has partnered for 10 years with top data teams to turn their data into profitable and efficiency hunting action. Learn more about Shaun.
